Did You Know...

Yesterday, the New York Times, as a Christmas gift to those of us who enjoy laughing until pumpkin pie and egg nog shoots out our noses, published a piece about how President Obama has a natural penchant for humility:

“I think it speaks volumes about the man’s temperament,” said Robert Dallek, the presidential historian. “He doesn’t crave the spotlight the way some of these other presidents have. They needed to be constantly in the eye of the public; it propelled them into politics in the first place. Obama is less that way; he is more of a self-contained person, someone who can genuinely spend time by himself with his family.”

Fortunately, a laughable statement such as “he doesn’t crave the spotlight” isn’t served without the talking-points chaser the White House shoved in every press pool reporter’s Christmas stocking.

Obama is reading a biography about Ronald Reagan while on vacation. How do we know this? Because it’s been trumpeted by the White House so hard that you’d think Dizzy Gillespie was the new Press Secretary. So naturally, in the very next paragraph of the same column, we can see that the press is starting to run with the coming year’s planned image makeover. President Obama doesn’t like to make things “all about him,” just like, guess who? Ronald Reagan:

He is not the first. Ronald Reagan played host to the queen of England at his mountaintop ranch in Santa Barbara, Calif., but he rarely invited members of his own cabinet there. He regarded it as “his and Nancy’s special place,” said Kenneth M. Duberstein, his former chief of staff, and he resented the photographers with their long lenses who angled for a shot of him on horseback.

“It bothered Reagan that he couldn’t just go off camera for a while,” Mr. Duberstein said.

Ten bucks says Obama has a jar of jelly beans on his desk by mid-January.